Information is vital in today's economy and customer expectations about the privacy and security of their confidential information have never been higher. Good companies invest in technological controls and defenses (firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection, etc) and create layers of defenses, similar to the layers of defense in a castle walls, moat, etc. But, just like the castle which has a gate in the wall and a bridge over the moat (it has to so people can get in and out to live), the modern technological walls have windows, ports and doors - they have to so you can carry information in and out to get work done.
That means that the most important layer in anyone's security is the human firewall - that layer of informed and educated people who can recognize a scam and head off a suspicious call before anyone's information has been compromised. People are the first, the last and sometimes the only line of defense against the hackers and con artists.
The discussion here will cover a range of security-related topics. Typically about half the are targeted to individuals - things you should do to protect yourself - and half are targeted to small companies - things you should do to protect your customers.
This blog opened in September 2008. Before that, we were publishing the security tips mostly via an email subscription list. We've brought over and backdated some of those earlier tips in the hope that they will be helpful.
Release:
The contents of this information security blog are published under the GNU Free Documentation License and may be freely shared or reused subject to the limitations of that license. We believe that it's more important to stop the hackers and spammers than that any one person get some kind of "credit". Help get the word out. If you know someone who could benefit from something here, pass the message along. Link them here or copy the material into your own newsletter. Use it as you see fit as long as we're teaching more people how to recognize and fight off these scams.
